The proposed research entails the study of human memory from a perspective that differs from, and is free of some of the problems with the perspective afforded by contemporary information-processing theory. The approach taken is a radically functional one, and is based on the assumption that recall is mediated by, or occurs in response to, memory cues. The essential aim of the research is to gain a better understanding of the conditions under which cues effect recall. Some of the proposed studies concern the description of the recallability of a population of items in terms of what we call the cugram, which is a contingency relation between the effectiveness of one category of cues with that of two (or more) others. One purpose of these studies is to evaluate the assumption underlying the technique used to derive cuegrams, according to which a cue that does not effect recall of a given item does not alter the probability that this item will be recalled in response to another cue given on some later occasion. Another purpose is to explore the effect on the cuegram of several experimental variables. Other studies concern the forgetting of a set of items, which in terms of the present conceptual framework is the decrease in the proportion of them that are recalled in response to some particular cue or cues. More specifically, it is assumed that the effectiveness of a cue with respect to any given item declines with the number of items for which it is effective, and based on this assumption several series of experiments are designed to determine the extent to which various nominally designated cues actually function as such. A third major concern is with two topics that seem particularly well suited to an information-processing interpretation--echoic memory and rehearsal. The overall idea here is to explore the generality of the present approach, and more specifically to see whether the available evidence on these subject matters can be accounted for, and further useful research generated, without recourse to such information-processing constructs as stores, registration, search, and retrieval.